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For months, Republican pundits, legislators, and even Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell have warned that the Fairness Doctrine—an equal time regulation repealed in the '80s, and long a b�te noire of talk jocks on the right side of the dial—is threatening to stage a triumphant, Mickey Rourke-style comeback. In a briefing paper released Tuesday, the Internet advocacy group Free Press dismisses these worries as a "distraction," arguing that the doomsayers are improperly conflating the politically moribund rule with unrelated "localism" and media consolidation rules. Ironically, Free Press itself can claim a healthy chunk of the credit for that.

The paper, authored by Marvin Ammori and Josh Silver, echoes an argument made by Free Press program director Craig Aaron late last year in The Guardian. It begins by seeking to reassure the skittish Limbaughs and Hannities of the world that the long-dormant Federal Communications Commission rule, which required broadcasters to present a variety of views on controversial issues, is safely dead and buried. While the authors contest in passing claims that the doctrine ever exerted a significant chilling effect on political speech, they agree that its resurrection would be undesirable—a position they note is shared by President Barack Obama.

The argument against the Fairness Doctrine is not hard to guess, and Free Press offers a temperate version of the one you might hear on talk radio: giving regulators discretion to determine when a station has discussed an issue in an adequately "balanced" fashion opens a political hornet's nest and raises profound First Amendment questions. Indeed, while the Supreme Court signed off on the Doctrine in a 1969 case, Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC, the authors predict that the current Court would be likely to find it unconstitutional—a conclusion in line with the findings of a a recent report from the Congressional Research Service.

But Silver and Ammori also push back against efforts to associate the politically radioactive Fairness Doctrine with efforts to more vigorously regulate in favor of local programming, diversity of media ownership, and even net neutrality—efforts for which the Democratic commissioners now in the saddle at the agency have voiced strong support. As they accurately point out, "localism" regulation has enjoyed bipartisan support in the past, and does not require regulators to pass judgment on the ideological "fairness" of a station's programming—only on its relevance to local concerns. Nor, indeed, do caps on media ownership prevent conservatives from owning the bulk of stations in any given market—so long as it is not the same conservative.

So where did conservatives get the wild idea that such regulation might be introduced as a kind of back-door substitute for the fairness doctrine? Well, possibly from a 2007 paper we mentioned here last week: "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio," jointly produced by Free Press and the Center for American Progress, and co-authored by one Josh Silver. The study, which is mentionedfrequently by those who fear the Fairness Doctrine's covert return, argues that "localism" rules, ownership caps, and "public interest" regulation are the best means by which to "correct" conservative dominance of talk radio.

The recent paper argues that, contrary to conservative claims, these forms of regulation "have nothing to do with the Fairness Doctrine." But in 2007, Free Press seemed to think they had quite a bit to do with each other:

The Fairness Doctrine was most effective as part of a regulatory structure that limited license terms to three years, subjected broadcasters to license challenges through comparative hearings, required notice to the local community that licenses were going to expire, and empowered the local community through a process of interviewing a variety of local leaders.... Simply reinstating the Fairness Doctrine
will do little to address the gap between conservative and progressive talk unless the underlying elements of the public trustee doctrine are enforced, in particular, the requirements of local accountability and the reasonable airing of important matters.

The new paper rejects the idea of a "political conspiracy" behind the renewed push for localism, noting that no censorship is involved because "no 'balance' of competing views is necessary, just attention to local concerns by the broadcaster licensed to use the local public airwaves to act as a public trustee of the community." But the 2007 paper argued that conservative programming was disproportionately prominent precisely because "the removal of ownership limits created artificial economies of scale for syndicated programming (dominated by conservative talk)" and because the erosion of "policies fostering local responsiveness" had facilitated a "move toward lowest common denominator syndicated programming." (Exactly what makes these economies of scale "artificial" is unclear.)

Reducing the influence of conservative talk hosts is, of course, not the only reason to mandate some threshold level of locally produced or focused programming, but in 2007, one of the authors of Tuesday's paper clearly regarded it as an important reason. Such rules may not require stations to run progressive programs, but with only so many hours in the day, competition between local programming and the popular nationally syndicated conservative talk jocks is ultimately zero-sum.

These rules do, at least, have the virtue of not placing the FCC in the position of directly passing judgment on the political valence of broadcast content—which the current papers take to mean that "public interest" rules in general should not be feared as "means of censorship." But the 2007 paper hints at a way that "local accountability" might be translated into crowdsourced regulation of content:

When 91 percent of the talk radio programming broadcast each weekday is solely conservative—despite a diversity of opinions among radio audiences and the proven success of progressive shows—the market solution has clearly failed to meet audience demand.

The paper suggests requiring stations to notify listeners of their right to comment to the FCC as license renewals approach, the better to scrutinize a station's "responsiveness" to the local community. Commissioners may not be able to deem a station's programming too conservative per se, but an agency determined to render stations "accountable" to the general population in their markets would have leeway to take complaints from unsympathetic residents as evidence that a station's ideological imbalance constituted a failure of "responsiveness." That is not, to be sure, how "localism" regulation is meant to work in principle—but principle is a thin shield against abuse, especially when the mere threat of problems with license renewal may spur station owners to revisit their lineups.

None of this is to say there aren't independently sound arguments for any of the regulations discussed in the briefing paper. But if it's true that "categorical opposition to all FCC policies that can imaginatively be lumped together with the Fairness Doctrine should draw deep skepticism," then so too should wide-eyed protestations of innocent wonder at how anyone could "imaginatively" posit a connection.